The Light of Evening (23 page)

Between them once such nearness, breathing in tandem where they slept together, most often petrified, in the same bed,

the same tastes in food, the lemon curd with the soft folds of barely baked meringue over a queen of puddings, the same tastes in fashion, a penchant for the tweeds with the flecks of blue and purple, colors that summoned up hill and dale, the blue glass rosary beads from Lourdes that they prayed on together, each praying that the other would not die first, vowing to die together, inseparable, and yet sundered. Eleanora with a different lifestyle, men and Shakespeare and God knows what else, oh yes, a fine firmament in which there was no chair saved for mother.

Those letters she wrote on Sunday nights, after her husband had gone up to bed, mostly ignored, or perhaps burned. Eleanora’s letters not at all in the same vein. Vivid descriptions of beautiful squares in Mediterranean cities, the warm blond of the buildings, palazzos, people gathering of an evening for their coffee and their aperitifs, orange groves, lemon groves, olive trees with their trunks deformed but their leaves young and whispery. Picturesque things, but never the pith, never why her daughter was in those blond squares or whom she was with, not the letters a mother would have wished for, not an opening or rather a reopening of hearts, such as had once been.

Bart

dilly is with bart in a little nook, where he has asked for her to be brought to talk in private. He has been led there by a nurse, his mittened hand reaching out to find hers, then groping for the chair on account of his sight almost gone.

At first he reminisces about her husband and their place, the lorry loads of sandstone that he and another brought from the ruins of an Englishman’s house to build Rusheen, her husband and him on the best of terms when they met at horse fairs and horse shows. He has sent for her, as he says, for a bit of advice, she and her husband being educated people.

“What’s wrong, Bart, what is it?” she asks as she watches him, his agitation, sucking the air between his teeth, muttering curse words.

“He banjaxed my spray, missus … the spray for my heart, thought I was finished and if you saw me you’d think it too, without my spray … the phone ripped out of the wall and in the yard what did the bucko do but pull the rug I had over the van to keep the engine warm, pull it off … no car, no phone … no spray … it’s what drove me here and why wouldn’t it. My own cousin. Highwayman with his highwaywoman. Coveting all I have. Manus was an all right sort of fella till he married her. Thomand no less. She began to come around a lot after she saw the sight going on me. It went by degrees. Cute. Cute. She’d pretend she’d left something, a brooch since Christmas night

and that it had to be somewhere. Left no brooch, only an excuse to rummage, to root in drawers and wardrobe, to see where I’d be hiding my little bit of money. It has to be somewhere, she’d keep saying, describing the brooch, a marcasite leaf, a gift from a Yank. A stunt. No brooch at all. Picking out the glasses from the glass cabinet, that queer sound of tinkling glass that says a sailor is dying at sea. What would I want with Waterford crystal, she’d yell. Put them back, I says, and I hit out with the stick. Oh, I was just giving them a dust, she’d say. Then the husband come round one evening, saying it being so wet he’d put the animals in for me. Sat himself down. It’s about time, says he, that you’d be thinking of making your will. Who says, so says I. If you die intestate the government gets their hands on it, it’ll be no good to anyone. That won’t happen, says I. He had a few more excuses up his sleeve such as that my memory might be going. I knew she was behind it. Madam Thomand. A bad breed, a nobreed, her father tramped the roads. ‘Twas I gave her husband the site to build his house before he met her, before she came on the scene. When a man marries a woman she turns him into her own likeness, her own crooked likeness. My two brothers and me never married. I have a niece of my sister’s out foreign in Vancouver, she’s all I have in the way of blood. Manus an all right sort of fellow until he met her, the biddy. Gave him the site because I thought he’d be company, a voice passing by, bringing milk or wood for the fire and keeping my fences up. No such luck. All he wanted was to get his hands on my place. I’ll make no feckin’ will, I says. He began cursing and swearing, began to smash all before him. I go to the phone to pick it up and I declare to God didn’t he pull the gadget out of its socket to prevent me. They knowed I have a niece and were afraid I’d give it to her. A few weeks after he comes back all pie. We’ll do a boozer, he says, and brings me up in the van to the pub. With them sleeping pills that I was taking the drink got up to my brain box too fast and there was no bread to soak it up. We were in the parlor.

He’d plonked a bottle of whiskey down on the table and glasses. Declare to God, Thomand has a smart fountain pen and a bottle of ink and says she has a trusted witness in the person of Mrs. Deane, her first cousin that owns the bar. Next thing she produces one of them forms you get from the post office to make a will easy, without having to go to a solicitor. Drunk as I was I wouldn’t sign. I jumped up and I says, I’ll go into the bar and tell the trick you’re pullin’ on me. They were bucking. ‘Twas after that the war really began. My fences pulled down. My little terrier poisoned. I got the guards onto them, but they couldn’t prove it, couldn’t prove a thing. The jubilee nurse telling me Thomand was odd on account of being childless. Not odd but bad. I tell you, missus, that’s only the skim of it. Now I’m here and I’m nearly stone-blind and day and night I’m thinking what will happen to my little place. I dreamed twice of smoke coming out the front door. Only a few years left and a bitch begrudging me my three fields, my little boat, and the house I was reared in. Better not have chick nor child nor blood relative, because all they think is grab, grab
—
turn you over when you’re gone to rifle your pockets.”

Walking back, Dilly thinks she sees on the several faces that same predicament, that fret, thinking of their shops, their herds, their holdings, and what will become of them, puzzling what they must do and do smartly, or else …

Nolan

“frigging chest of drawers no effing good, two more stuck and the snib in Castleknock telling Larry that all it needs is oiling and Mrs. Lavelle … nearly bolted … up at the hall door in the middle of the night, tomfooled a driver, asked him to give her a lift out, and he fell for it …”

It is Nolan with the daily installment of news and happenings. In the week Dilly has heard of Mrs. Lavelle and her bids to escape and of a man from Kerry dressed to go home suddenly asking to be let sit down and never getting up again. “Beyond the beyond” as Nolan puts it.

Dilly is not listening, not heeding, caught up in her own stew, her affairs topsy-turvy, her daughter not answering the telephone, and a presentiment that she will never get out of there now.

Nolan sees tears but thinks, because they have become friends, that she can dispel them with chatter: “Didn’t tell you about the fella that proposed to me. A bachelor. Two-story house, five miles outside Loughrea. Used to do B and Bs. Jesus. Him doing B and Bs. “What d’you give them for the breakfast,’ I says. ‘Tay and flakes and orange juice.’ Says if I shack up with him he’ll will me the place … I’ll be a big shot five miles outside Loughrea … following the hounds, the Galway blazers. He’ll will me the place, my eye. He has a will here and a will there and when they’re gone, relatives fighting and shooting each other and that’s the holy alls

of it. I’ll string him along, tell him I’m thinking it over just to get a rise off him. You won’t believe it but this morning he asks me to put my hand in his pajama pocket. ‘I will not,’ I says. Trying to get me to tickle his fandango. Next thing there’ll be a document on a bit of ruled paper saying, ‘I of sound mind and so forth.’ All bull. Poor bugger, poor buggers, married or unmarried they’re all longing, they’re all dying for a grope.”

Seeing Dilly so listless, she leans in to cradle her, wipes a tear and then another, dries them with the corner of her teacloth, and says in a whisper, “Ah, missus, you’re not the worst off … strokes is the worst … strokes is the end of the road altogether.”

Cornelius

dilly is finishing the dish of jelly and custard when she looks up and then looks away, startled. Her husband, whom she is not expecting, is coming down along the ward, carrying oranges in a mesh bag and a tin of sweets. Billy the ex-blacksmith skulking behind him, one hand in the pocket, both men hesitating, like they’re going to be ordered out of there.

For one awful series of seconds she thinks her husband has gone on the batter again, he and Billy being erstwhile drinkers at races and shows, but to her relief when Con stands over her she realizes he is completely sober, sober and that bit constrained. Their arrival has in some way discombobulated her. She has slid into the hospital routine, into limbo, as she calls it, waking very early, a pewterish light, the pigeons rustling in the trees, their throaty murmurs, then the slow advance of dawn, the little dickie bird poised for a gust of wind and Nolan arriving with the illicit cup of tea in a special china cup, a wet flannel to freshen her face, the second cup of tea tasting like senna, and deliberations with Nolan as to what to have for lunch and what to have for dinner, various doctors converging with an air of importance, and students trooping behind them, not uttering a word.

Now with her husband standing there she remembers home so acutely, her twelve or thirteen hens, their nests most likely sodden because she is not there to put the clean sops of hay in,

ashes not emptied, another bill for oil, and Rusheen beginning to look neglected.

“Ye needn’t have come,” she says somewhat shyly. Billy was coming anyhow, she is told. Billy having to see the eye doctor in a different hospital about his cataracts. Billy is down for an operation three months hence, the waiting list being that long. Regardless of his poor eyesight Billy is a speed merchant and Con tells her with a certain pride that the journey door-to-door was under two hours, one that would take Buss closer to four.

“He always drives as if he’s going to a funeral,” Billy says with a snigger. There is still that unwashed look to him, his face blackish from being in the forge for over forty years, smelting horseshoes and lengths of iron in the roaring fire.

“Two hours is far too fast, it’s dangerous,” she says.

“Well, we’re here,” Con says and clumsily hands over the gifts.

They sit awkwardly, unaccustomed to hospital noises, the phones, the ringing bells, the wheeling of trolleys, vacillating between bouts of talk and bouts of silence. The dog misses her, has stationed herself in a hole under the hedge, eager for her return. They rack their brains for news, a bank robbery, Tilda, a young girl tied up, a new priest saying Mass, rumors that Father Gerrard is out of favor with his bishop due to drinking habits and frequenting a hotel in Ennis for ballad sessions.

Seeing her husband in his everyday clothes, a bit unkempt, his cuffs hanging loose, she asks if he is eating enough, as she might ask a child.

“He is not,” Billy chimes in, and there follows a contest about the number of cigarettes Con smoked on their journey, Billy insisting that it was at least twenty and Con taking the packet from his pocket to show that there were still a few left, which meant he hadn’t smoked the full twenty. They talk of the weather, the weather in the city and the weather down the country, her husband telling her then that Crotty has agreed to sleep in for the weeks she is away, her husband a grown man, afraid to sleep

alone in his own house, he who for many a year struck terror into her and Eleanora.

“What do they say is wrong with you?” he asks her.

“What do they not say?” she answers with a sarcasm, then tells him that all her tests had to be retaken and re-sent to the laboratory. Billy with his own private and scornful agenda pipes up to say that doctors know nothing, that doctors chance their arms just as much as gamblers do.

They have been treated to tea and biscuits, the conversation stilted, when Dilly comes up with a brainwave. From the small leather wallet that she herself had thonged at night classes, she produces some ten-pound notes and says that it is a grand opportunity for him to go down to the town and buy himself a pair of shoes.

“I’m fine as I am,” he says.

“Look … go down to O’Connell Street … Billy and you … you’ll be glad of the little stroll after sitting in that car,” and Billy thrills to the idea, recalls a hotel near Parnell Square where he drank with hurley players after an all-Ireland hurley final.

When they are gone she commences on the letter. She reminds Con how dear Rusheen is to them both and how fortunate at their not losing it, managing to cling on, doing their sums, as she says, in times of adversity, proud of that and prideful when motorists stop down at the gate to look up at it, the fine house of warm sandstone, trees of every denomination girdling it. She reminds him of the flurried and coercive occasion when she made her will, he acting as witness, but neither having the gumption to object. Would it not be fairer, she asks, then answers, to divide things equally between both children? If anything should happen to her she is appealing to him to honor this final wish. It is the first letter she has written to her husband in over fifty years, an admission that makes her choke back a tear. Fifty years. The golden jubilee that neither remembered. Fields let for grazing. No more the proud neighing thoroughbreds in

the fields, the thoroughbreds on which his hopes centered and his fortune lost.

They return overcheerful and talkative.